Co-Production: Blobs and Squares

In a class, we have been talking a little bit about “co-production” from the standpoint of federal government organizations. Co-production is the idea that institutions and citizens (or other entities) can and should work in complementary ways. As an example, the “see something, say something” campaign is such an effort.

There are a couple of ways of looking at this idea. One is from an institutional standpoint: How can we get citizens to “do their part?” This is illustrated in a video based on work by Edgar Cahn, called the Parable of the Blobs and Squares.

The video describes a vexing problem when it comes to co-production. Institutions (squares) tend to force citizens (blobs) to function like squares when they try to work together.

This ingenious video uses cartoon-like blobs and squares to illustrate the different contributions that institutions and people can make in solving problems, and . . . paints a good picture of the relationship that I see most frequently when institutions try to solve problems through the most typical paths of community engagement.

In my experience, community engagement for most institutions (governments, foundations, established non-profits) involves people in institutions (squares) talking to people (blobs) to understand a problem and get their advice on how they should solve the problem. Institutions talk to people individually (surveys) or collectively (focus groups or forums or via other community engagement processes). . . . Too often, when they give grants to community groups, they do that without understanding what they are doing to them by forcing them into a non-profit organization mold by their requirements or expectations.

It also shows what happens to the grassroots groups that people in a community form for mutual aid and collective action become more like squares than blobs – most often, when they are trying to gain legitimacy or find resources in their quest to get something done about a big problem in their community. They gain something (capacity to do things that squares are good at doing) but they lose something (capacity to do what blobs are good at doing).

This video . . . calls for co-production – a way of working together that allows squares to do what they do well and blobs to bring their unique gifts, perspectives and talents to the table. [O]ne of the things that makes it hard is that we – all of us – have a love-affair with squares and a dismissive attitude about blobs. Our love affair with squares has made us forget that we all are also blobs in some hours of our day or that the world of blobs even exists.

But it does not have to be this way. We can, instead, see that there are shared concerns that both institutions and citizens have — and that both “squares” and “blobs” have an interest and things to contribute. So instead of seeing Neighborhood Watch programs as “citizens helping the police,” we might instead be able to see a way to define public safety as a shared endeavor in the community. In this instance, then, the police would in fact be “helping the community” rather than vice versa.

This is not pie-in-the-sky, though it is an alternative way of seeing things. Indeed, Nobel Prize winner in economics Elinor Ostrom won her shared award for showing that resources in the commons could be effectively managed through co-production of citizens.

What examples have you seen, if any, of this kind of co-production? My guess is this happens on a smaller scale more frequently than on larger scales.

One thought on “Co-Production: Blobs and Squares”

I think it was you that said in class that government by and large is not filled with experts. That has a lot of truism attached to it, in that senior managers and appointees come with yes some technical expertise but rely on the technicians to do the detailed work. From our class we talked duopoly where in the IT world, it takes, at the Federal level anyway, a govie and technical expert to develop the requirements and resources. In this way, both audiences should take note that developing and implementing a vision is important, but also staying true to what that is and that both parties stay connected and transparent with each other to ensure mutually beneficial outcomes.